On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 02:49:29AM -0600, Jack Bates wrote:
Yeah. Give things away for free and you go bust. In Oklahoma, the telco price for DSL is around $35. SWBell was doing a plan for the longest time (may still be doing it) of allowing ISPs to use their DSL, but the problem with the deal is that the ISP only got $10 out of it. $10/mo for 1.5Mb bandwidth? ha! If I'm nice, I might give you 64k for $10/mo. Modems have the luxury of working well on oversell because we 1) oversell the lines going into the modems at anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1 depending on the town and 2) oversell the bandwidth because p2p is too slow and takes too long, so many modem users don't use it. Take this to DSL speeds and then it's suddenly attractive and they'll suck a 1.5Mb/s worth in nothing flat. Let's see. It costs me a minimum of $1000/mo for a T1 (loop charge, not port) to some of these DSL supporting towns. The home user isn't going to pay $1000/mo for their 24/7 p2p. I can't afford to support it at $50/mo either. Even cranking up to DS3, I don't save much on the oversell. 30 customers doing p2p will do well on saturation of a DS3 and even if I have 180 customers with only 30 doing p2p, $9,000/mo (50/per) is hardly going to pay for the DS3. Much less the SWBell "you get $10" plan. Thus I charge more than $50/mo and you can forget getting 1.5Mb at that price. Unfortunately, there are ISPs out there who are trying to compete against people in Chapter 11 or people who are subsidizing DSL costs with other costs (ie, SWBell does 1.5Mb/s for $49.95/mo which they are subsidizing with the telco and business customers but still lose money on the home user).
Get some QoS for the p2p traffic and stop complaining. One moment everyone is begging for the "killer app" to motivate high-speed residential connectivity, the next they're pissing and moaning because it actually happened. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)